Right Thinking from the Left Coast

Tag: Cain

The damn has officially broke. I had mentioned in an earlier Cain post that the presumption of innocence will stay with Cain as long as 1)nothing further emanates from the two sexual harassment complaints, and 2) no other victims come forward. On Friday we heard that the one victim who through her attorney requested the NRA unbind her from her confidentiality agreement so that she could “set the record straight” and rebut Cain’s blanket denials. Although the NRA gave her permission to do just that, she decided that it was all in the past and did not want to open up old wounds, understandably and totally within her right. At that point I figured that the storm has past and the HMS Cain had braved the shoals unscathed. now this:

A fourth woman has accused Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain of sexual harassment–this time in public. Sharon Bialek told reporters in a press conference Monday that Cain groped her and exhibited “sexually inappropriate” behavior toward her when he was head of the National Restaurant Association.

Unlike the other two accusations, we have a live person here, willing to identify herself and go into detail as to exactly what she says Cain did to her, not good.

After dinner, the two were sitting in his car when she claimed he “suddenly reached over and put his hand on my leg under my skirt and reached for my genitals” and moved her head toward his crotch.

“I was surprised and shocked, and I said, what are you doing? You know I have a boyfriend,” Bialek recalled saying. “This is not what I came here for.”

Bialak claimed that when she protested, Cain replied, “You want a job, right?

Naturally, the Cain camp has declared these accusations as baseless as well.

We had talked about a pattern before, that given the nebulousness of sexual harassment, it’s complete subjectivity in both defining and identifying it, that if nothing else surfaces, given his decades long tenure in private business management, that the benefit of the doubt must be afforded to him.

And granted, having Gloria Alred in tow does not lend itself to credibility, but now I’m wondering that since the green light has now flashed, what other stories will come to the surface.

The sexual harassment angle on the Cain train will be with us for as long as Cain is relevant. For what damage I thought he did to himself, caught unprepared, which led to pettifogging, obfuscating, and revising his statements as he went along, the fact that the day after the story broke was his biggest payday wrt donations into his campaign tells us that Cain (for the time being) is still relevant and popular.

I made a comment in the other Cain post that he better pray that no one else comes forward claiming victimhood in what looks like a pattern, this did not take long:

A third former employee says she considered filing a workplace complaint over what she considered aggressive and unwanted behavior by Herman Cain when she worked for the presidential candidate in the 1990s. She says the behavior included a private invitation to his corporate apartment.

Now that this has in fact happened, I am going to moderate my position a bit. I do not think THIS allegation is going to hurt him much, here’s why, the source says she considered filing a workplace complaint…………but she didn’t. Secondly, all we have now (this story could flesh out big time later) is an anonymous source telling us that at some point in the past Cain did something she found offensive, not much “there” there.

If this was the first sexual harassment salvo into the HMS Cain, then it would be more note worthy (like Anita Hill) but it wasn’t and now it smacks of piling on, and until this woman adds more detail to her allegations, I give it the minimalist attention that it is due. The other two women are worthy of attention because they put it on the line, they made the official complaint knowing that they would lose their jobs in the process (but apparently the situation was so untenable that it was worth it to them), they got their money and made the settlement.

The other Cain story in the works now is that the attorney for one of there aggrieved women wants the NRA to unbind the agreement of confidentiality so that she can answer to Cain’s response that the charges were unfounded:

A woman who complained about Herman Cain’s behavior when he was president of the National Restaurant Association wants to be released from a confidentiality restriction so she can respond to his statements on the matter, her lawyer said Tuesday.

Washington lawyer Joel P. Bennett said the woman disagreed with Mr. Cain’s public comments about reports that two female employees of the restaurant trade group had accused him of sexual harassment in the late 1990s. Mr. Cain said this week that he had been “falsely accused” and that the complaints were “baseless.”

“My client disputes Mr. Cain’s claims that he never sexually harassed anyone, and that the claims had no merit,” Mr. Bennett said.

For Cain’s sake, he better hope that agreement is enforced to the letter. The last thing he needs is for this woman to get in front of a camera and either catalog his transgressions, or make stuff up, either way, it will hurt him.

From the other post, it became clear to me that I view sexual harassment as more sinister and deplorable then many. Sure, many times it comes down to he said/she said, and often times innocuous actions can be wrongly interpreted, I get that, but for a woman to risk her job, her livelihood (knowing that corporations talk amongst themselves and continuing in that field might prove problematic) all over one or two incidents of “discomfort”, no, filing a formal complaint is like the last resort and indicative (to me) that they felt they could not work in that environment.

Many on the right have brought up the Clinton/Lewinsky affair for comparisons sake, to me there is no comparison, sexual harassment is worse. Both offer the power dynamic, one party either being the boss or having power over the other, but Clinton’s BJ’s were at least consensual, with Monica getting something out it, sexual harassment is not consensual, it is unwanted, and usually is repetitive and continual, and sometimes stopped only by formal complaints being lodged.

My complaints about Cain and his shortcomings have already been made in other posts, and regarding this story, as long as nothing further reveals itself, he will pretty much be left unscathed. He has said they are baseless, I will believe him (for now) and hope that he learned a lesson out of all this, be prepared, his days of winging it on the fly are over, and he is not very good at it anyway.